While I am its maintainer, thus biased, I firmly believe that HTML::HTML5::Parser is the best Perl HTML parser on the block. It's perhaps somewhat slower than HTML::Parser but because it uses the same HTML5 parsing algorithm found in modern web browsers, it should do a better job on tag soup.

Whatsmore, it parses the HTML into an XML::LibXML DOM tree, which I firmly believe is the best XML DOM for Perl (even though it's not pure Perl - it's based on libxml2 which is implemented in C).

I'm also the author of Web::Magic which aims to integrate the two modules mentioned above with LWP::UserAgent and various other things to provide a "do what I mean" solution for interacting with RESTful HTTP resources. Here's an example using Web::Magic...

use 5.010;
use Web::Magic;

say Web::Magic
    -> new('http://www.perlmonks.org/', node_id => 974112)
    -> querySelector('title')
    -> textContent

[download]

And here's an advantage of how you'd do something similar without Web::Magic...

use 5.010;
use HTML::HTML5::Parser;

my $xml = HTML::HTML5::Parser->load_html(
    location => 'http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=974112'
);

my $nodes = $xml->findnodes('//*[local-name()="title"]');

say $nodes->get_node(1)->textContent;

[download]
perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re: extracting data from HTML by tobyink
in thread extracting data from HTML by Jurassic Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.